Secure Multi-Party Computation with Identifiable Abort

Yuval Ishai and Rafail Ostrovsky and Vassilis Zikas

Protocols for secure multi-party computation (MPC) that resist a
dishonest majority are susceptible to ``denial of service'' attacks,
allowing even a single malicious party to force the protocol to abort.
In this work, we initiate a systematic
study of the more robust notion of security with identifiable
abort}, which leverages the effect of an abort by forcing, upon
abort, at least one malicious party to reveal its identity.

We present the first information-theoretic} MPC protocol which is
secure with identifiable abort (in short ID-MPC) using a correlated
randomness setup. This complements a negative result of Ishai et
al. (TCC 2012) which rules out information-theoretic ID-MPC in the
OT-hybrid model, thereby showing that pairwise} correlated
randomness is insufficient for information-theoretic \mbox{ID-MPC.}

In the standard model (i.e., without a correlated randomness setup),
we present the first computationally secure ID-MPC protocol making
black-box} use of a standard cryptographic primitive, namely an
(adaptively secure) oblivious transfer (OT) protocol. This provides a
more efficient alternative to existing ID-MPC protocols, such as the
GMW protocol,
that make a non-black-box use of the underlying primitives.

As a theoretically interesting sidenote, our black-box ID-MPC provides
an example for a natural cryptographic task that can be realized using
a black-box access} to an OT protocol but cannot be realized
unconditionally using an ideal OT oracle.